How Magical Life Would Be
by ReprobaVir
Summary: "...if stories like this were this were true." John Smith dreams of adventure, of horrifying creatures, beautiful maidens, startling warriors, and impossible worlds. - A ficlet that highlights some of the (im)possible visions from the Doctor's adventure as a human, starting with the Ninth incarnation of the Doctor.
1. Her

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but am grateful we are allowed to play within it's endless universe. A thank you to the BBC and all authors and actors therein.

This story is best read in 1/2 width.

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There's a gigantic room with a pulsing, glowing heart at the center of it. Structural supports shaped like tendons placed seemingly wherever they felt like reached all about, various things tossed about over the struts, like a dark jacket or a musty hat.

A mysterious and, frankly, ridiculous number of knobs and buttons surround the center column, the soul of this creature (this machine, this _woman_ - for the whole thing felt distinctly fuzzy and feminine, warm and possessive) peering out behind tubes stretching from the mass of technology and making him feel like running.

Everything is awash with an unearthly green. Lit up and vibrant, it's both terrifyingly unnatural and soothing as he passes within the glow.

He can feel it in his bones, a _humming_. Like nothing he'd ever heard, if you could call it hearing, it thrummed in his head, his skin, his bones. Like a mood, like a lullaby.

It was a feeling, more than anything. In feeling _her_ he almost forgot his solitude.

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Please review, constructive criticism is welcome.


	2. Empty

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but am grateful we are allowed to play within it's endless universe. A thank you to the BBC and all authors and actors therein.

This story is best read in 1/2 width.

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He is so _lonely_.

Cold and bitter, he can tell there is blood on his hands, though he's rubbed them raw against the walls, the floors and his hair; batters them against the columns and bruises them with his unsettling rage.

He screams at the bright green lights and strange writings. He throws anything he can get his calloused, lacking hands on in metal-grated corridors. He sobs for things he has lost, things he has never known.

There is an empty space in his head, once filled with songs and family and belonging, millions of voices silenced in a double heartbeat. It echoes with an emptiness that only fuels the burning ache in his chest. They're all gone. He can't reach them, whoever they are. He can't save them.

He is responsible for this. He doesn't know how, but he is. And so he reacts.

He makes as much noise as possible to fill the gap. He fills his hands with anything, anything at all, just so they aren't empty. He violently throws them away when he feels how cold and unyielding they are.

He stops doing everything entirely when the silence overpowers him. Overpowers the humming of his machine. He just sits there, hands resting on the grating, grasping for anything alive, anything familiar.

He is dark, angry, and very, _very_ alone.

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Please review, constructive criticism is welcome.


	3. Song

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but am grateful we are allowed to play within it's endless universe. A thank you to the BBC and all authors and actors therein.

This story is best read in 1/2 width.

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Weird worlds made up of colors, sounds, and sights that he couldn't fully explain if given a library and fifty years to think on it; this sad adventurer visits them all. Every world is as vast and new and terrifying as the next. The cultures are strange, the populations startling and the contrasts between them all are ever-flourishing.

He knows not where he'll end up or how he'll arrive, but there is one constant; this strange blue box. She - because the odd box _just had to _be a woman - is always there, waiting patiently for him while he runs from armies and swarms of horrifying monsters he'd just laughed in the face of - the great, bloody coward.

It's frightening really, how much natural power she hides inside her blue panels and strange contraptions. He's dashed into the doorway covered in soot and slime, roaring flame ravaging the landscape behind him or a hoard of enraged creatures close enough to snatch at his jacket and she comes out relatively unscathed. Bullets cannot pierce, fire cannot burn, swords cannot cleave her and no one, save him, is allowed inside.

She sings an eerie melody that haunts him and chills his marrow, but warms his eyes. It turns his mind away from the horrors on his life on the run and the loneliness that cuts into him in the silent moments. Everything is much softer when she sings.

He looks forward to long hours spent under the grating, deep in her womb. As he is tangled in cords and surrounded by hums and whirring he can almost pretend he knows what he's doing.

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Please review, constructive criticism is welcome.


	4. Speak

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but am grateful we are allowed to play within it's endless universe. A thank you to the BBC and all authors and actors therein.

This story is best read in 1/2 width.

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Languages aren't really anything he gave much thought about. You can speak as much German, Gaelic, French, _Sig_meesian, Calpyt-Ar, Chinese, and G**a**ern**aa** (what even half of those may be) as you like, but it will never prepare you for that moment when even _you_ don't know what you're saying. Word engendering and backwards writings, emphasis where there should be none, changes in pitch to signify familial relation in one culture or self-censorship in another.

There's even a language - if you can call it that - which consists primarily of clapping one's limbs in a syncopated pattern combined with the subtle cracking of certain bones. Best as he could make out, he'd ordered chips by snapping his left hand while he slapped his thigh with his right which was then followed by cracking three knuckles and his elbow.

He seems to wrap his tongue around strange lyrics, words and phrases with masterful ease, regardless of his confusion. But his _accent_! Like a Scotsman trying to speak Russian while imitating a Canadian accent. He'd never heard anything so barmy in his life, though the peoples of impossible races and worlds don't seem to take notice.

Even that marvelous blue box has a language of her own.

She hums with a blatant disappointment and he irritably responds with something (undoubtedly rude) in a tongue he doesn't recognize. This earns him a shock from one of the hanging wires he's sparking at and fumbling with. The lights dim and fire into life successively, and he can tell she's _laughing_ at him.

Her speech is that of color and noise, grinding gears and ear-ringing songs. Sparks and whistles and frightening cloister bells. Sometimes he even understands her. But only when he stops trying to.

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Please review, constructive criticism is welcome.


	5. Weapons

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but am grateful we are allowed to play within it's endless universe. A thank you to the BBC and all authors and actors therein. This story is best read in 1/2 width.

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This man hates guns. Doesn't mind having them pointed at him, because that's easy enough to fix (in fact, sometimes it seems he rather _likes_ it that way), but using them? Perish the thought.

His weapons appear to be well-placed words. Like a politician or an emperor (but _so_ far from that), the smallest of sentences and nods can send an entire civilization crumbling to his feet, groveling and pleading as he storms away. He changes history and fable, turning legend to life for people of all worlds with minimal efforts.

He commands attention with a harmless, whirring rod, and then demands action with his words. And he gets it.

It's as though he were a _God_.

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Please review, constructive criticism is welcome.


	6. Run

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but am grateful we are allowed to play within it's endless universe. A thank you to the BBC and all authors and actors therein. This story is best read in 1/2 width.

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She wears a lot of pink, but she's the most normal looking creature he's seen in these traveling, far-flung dreams.

She smells like cleaning chemicals and lilacs. The whole building does really, with it's hanging signs and neatly stacked cosmetics that look like pens and clothing that is just not decent (though if he's being honest, this woman isn't dressed appropriately, either.)

They are in a narrow hallway and she is going to die.

He's long since come to accept that people die. That sometimes there's _nothing_ you can do to save them, they just wither and perish.

And sometimes there's almost an invisible force holding his tongue, preventing his fists and magical pencil-thing from stepping in. Some weighty knowledge that just whispers in the back of his mind, in that empty space, that he would destroy all life if he even dared try. Whispering that this horror has to come to pass, and with it innumerable innocent souls - panicked and sobbing and always, _always_ screaming.

But he's here, _now_, she's just around the bend and she's _scared_ and _alone_. Just like he is. Surrounded by creatures that move when they shouldn't, things no one could understand but the adventurer. Creatures he can defeat by merely reaching into his extremely underestimated pockets.

His hand doesn't feel as cold and bloody when he grabs her smaller, warm one, dragging her after him with a word (a ridiculous, selfish, needy God that's always bloody running.)

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Please review, constructive criticism is welcome.


	7. Goddess

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, but am grateful we are allowed to play within it's endless universe. A thank you to the BBC and all authors and actors therein.

This story is best read in 1/2 width.

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She was so brave. Like an Amazonian Goddess, swinging down to knock away his captors, she re-ignited his weary heart. No longer was he a man looking for a way out, a hidden phial in his pocket and some self-accusatory slip of the tongue. He was refreshed, a new perspective lighting his eyes with the realization that there is still a future to move toward.

She could see everything with a child-like wonder, he'd show her _everything_ and shake her very beliefs so he could build them up again with the new found certainty that her whole world would be based on what she saw with him. So many things he didn't understand, languages he couldn't even start to comprehend, cultures that were completely backwards and very much _not British_. She'd see it all with her hand clasped tightly in his and a fiercely innocent grin touching her pink lips.

And they could race across the inky black and the stars with this startling blue box and be befuddled together.

No more emptiness. No clanging grates, echoes of footsteps past. No more sparking wires and flashbacks of a burning world, millions of voices snuffed from his consciousness with only explosive anger and sadness to fill the gaps.

She could be all "pink and yellow" and "fantastic" and so _there_.

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Please review, constructive criticism is welcome.


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